The finding of discarded electronic storage media still containing data has recently made news. People believed the data had been deleted when a data storage device had been removed and discarded. Computers with information still in the memory have been sold or discarded. Some of these devices contained classified government information and some contained highly sensitive and valuable personal data. The high profile media coverage of some of these happenings and the potential liability and losses from such disclosures have made it more important than ever to provide extra security against such inadvertent loss of information. Now, rather than subject a memory media to erasure of information, there is a move to physically destroy memory media.
While certain types of memory media may be easily destroyed, like flash memory, so called hard drives with rotating memory storage disks may require absolute destruction to help ensure that meaningful data cannot be extracted from the disks. One solution to this problem is to shred the hard drive, but such equipment is expensive, noisy and requires maintenance to ensure proper shredding. Further, such equipment is also not necessarily suited for use in many commercial environments like an office.
Hard drives for personal computers and laptops tend to be of a size and shape that will fit in a bay of predetermined size. The present invention takes advantage of this to provide an apparatus to destroy a hard drive by electrical voltage and physical destruction and adapted for use in many environments, including offices, without the need for a skilled operator.